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Writers hear much. Some of it follows them throughout life
and some makes no difference.

My best friend has said some
profound things in the thirty-four years I have known him. Infuriating truths that bore into your nerves. During my department store stocker days, I
remember whining about my job, even though I had no right. Back then, my friend divided his time between
a MASH unit and the hospital where he worked as an ER trauma nurse. I had not lived enough yet to understand. My parents were alive and my house still un-flooded.
I was too untouched by life to realize
he and I knew different thresholds of pain.
A “bad day” didn’t mean the same thing to me as it did to him. When he tired of my whining, he said, “Look,
everybody’s job sucks. That’s why they
call it ‘work’ and not ‘play.’”

Guess what I
still hear at 2 o’clock in the morning, when I’m staring at the ceiling?

Here’s
another one, from the summer of 1992.

My family had
recently moved back to Missouri, and my friend was visiting. He leaned against our washing machine, while
I sat on the corner of a desk, beside the typewriter my parents had ordered
from Fingerhut. Because he is a
caregiver, he listened to my lamentations again, but what he said at the end became
another one of those nerve-jangling truths that this time felt like a betrayal.

That week’s
tragedy came out an old copy of Writer’s
Digest wherein an article asked, “Do you want to write, or do you want to
have written?”

I didn’t like
the question, because I had no answer.
Well, that’s not actually true. I
was afraid of trying to answer. Avoiding
it all together meant I would never have to consider that maybe I just wanted
to have written. Most of the articles in
WD said those who wanted to have
written really just wanted fame and fortune.
I took comfort in that neither of those was my goal, but I never
considered it could also mean something else.

Writing takes
a lot of work to appear effortless.

Even though I could get lost in
writing for hours, some of that time (no, let’s be honest -- a lot of it) was
taken up with reading how-to books on characterization or plotting --
painkillers for the blank page. Those
books told me the average professional writer produced about 2000 words every
day. I remember actually circling the
number with my index finger and feeling the same giddiness a comic book
collector feels every time he steps into an old flea market and dreams of digging up a
copy of Action Comics #1. I wanted to write 2000 words a day.

And sustained a consistent pace
only once. For a whole month. All during the January before my 19th
birthday, I wrote 10 pages per day longhand.
I was so very proud of the notebooks piling up, but I still refused to
call myself a writer after that, because after that I never finished much. Does
that sound like you want to write, or that you want to have written?

After my friend
quietly listened to these fears of being an amateur, he said the thing that
felt like a betrayal:

“You know, until somebody starts paying you to
do this, you’re going to have to accept that it’s just a hobby.”

Something in
me shriveled. My pragmatic friend was
wrong. Why did this have to be a
hobby? Why did money have to be the
determining factor? I didn’t have to be
rich. All I wanted was to be able to
write full time.

If
your goal is eight pages of finished script a day and you only produce two
pages on Monday, you had better produce fourteen on Tuesday . . . . You may
never gain [financial security]. If you can produce only one or two category
novels a year . . . you will never know a time when the wolves are not a
stone’s throw from the door.

--
Dean Koontz

Writing Popular Fiction

My friend is
a clever man. I think he wanted to piss
me off enough to prove him wrong.

I didn’t
listen. At 21, I still had decades to
become a writer. If I didn’t want to
write today, I wouldn’t have to. It was
okay to take a break every time it got difficult and inspiration
evaporated. I wouldn’t have to push
myself until I was publishing regularly.
No, I didn’t realize the contradiction.
I refused to let myself just write, even if it was crap. If I had done that . . . just write and write
and write . . .

Only about 30% of what professional
writers produce is publishable, meaning that what the public sees is only about
1/3 of what an author actually writes. It
was years before I would understand that the good ideas lie beneath all the crap,
and that you have to write through the upper layers to get to them.

Instead, I
kept waiting for when I would be able to write 2000 words a day. Obviously, this inevitably happened to all
writers, magically, around the time they sold their first novel, probably.

Then, I
turned 30 -- with the knowledge that Stephen King published his first novel at
26. By the time he was my age, Isaac
Asimov published I, Robot and was
probably working on the last draft of Foundation. Bradbury gave us The Martian Chronicles. A
30-year-old Poe was inventing new genres.
And Conan’s father Robert E. Howard was dead.

I had been
writing “seriously” for 12 years. The
notebooks I rolled through and completed that one January now held pages with
yellowing edges. One drawer of the
filing cabinet hid a handful of short stories, most with chunks still waiting
to be written. I had even submitted a
couple. Years ago. However, if someone had asked me “Can you
show me some of your writing?” I would
have had a hard time finding something whole.

When was the last time you finished a story?

I don’t remember.

If I had
written just 100 words a day in those years, I would have had 4 novels or
roughly 100 short stories.

Plenty of time
remained though, even if I hadn’t felt like writing in the last month. (The periods that I didn’t write had grown longer.) I didn’t have as much time as I used to. I had been working 40 hours a week for a
number of years. I had a marriage and a
mortgage and much better excuses not to write.

If
you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin
to die, or act crazy, or both.

-- Ray
Bradbury

Zen in the Art of Writing

I was either
32 or 33 when I quit. Back in my early
twenties, I met a real estate agent who had once wanted to be a writer. “Don’t ever give up,” he said. “You’ll regret
it.” I thought: That’s not something I have to worry about. Why would I ever give up? When I did, I realized he was wrong. The word “hobby” no longer offended me. Walking away from writing no longer felt like
hollowing out my soul. It merely faded
into something I used to do.

Another
decade passed. I became a dad. I got a degree. I got hurt.
The house flooded. Mom was
gone. Then, so was Dad. And through all that I never had anything to
write about.

Remember my
best friend who is full of those quips that seem to stick in your skull? He picked up a new hobby in the last few years. He writes a blog called The Pen and the Sword
about his adventures as a Redneck Diplomat.
He’s working on a book too. He
always did run faster than me.

Oh how I wish
I could go back and talk with that 8-year-old child, who lived in the
countryside, bored, and decided one day to write a play about a monster. The 4 or 5 pages contained several sketches in
place of the words he could not spell. I
would have said, “Keep doing that. Every
day.”

Let’s assume that’s true.The whole world is basically an episode of Hoarders, chock-full from basement drain to gable vent of plot
threads and character snippets, and we Wannabes have chosen to be too
anesthetized to notice.If the Ideas-Are-Everywhere
theory were true, authors never would agree to book signings.Imagine the conversations in the fan queue:

“We pay you to be creative, right?So, I am supposed to take money out of my
pocket and put it into yours, even though I saw that idea on page ninety-eight
lying by the street lamp two blocks from your house?Anybody could have picked it up.”

Stories would be as mysterious and magical as an egg timer.(“I can’t believe it.It went ding
again!”)Everything would be
obvious.Worse yet, people with even the
slightest creative potential would lose their minds from idea overload.

Ideas would reach out and snag your toes at 3:00 a.m., when you
are convinced the bathroom migrated to the wrong side of the house.

The strange thing is I also agree with the Ideas-Are-Everywhere
theory.When looking at the bibliography
of writers like Robert Silverberg, it’s easy to imagine that he must be able to
turn anything into a story, and in Silverberg’s case an excellent story.

With the average person -- or at least me -- most ideas are
crap, though.Especially in their raw
form.

JACK:I suppose I ought
to try to do some writing, first.

WENDY:Any ideas,
yet?

JACK:Lots of
ideas.No good ones.

-- Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining

If you have lots of ideas and no good ones, maybe you
stopped too soon.If everything you write feels stupid, it
probably means the good ideas just haven’t arrived yet.What you have written is still
embryonic.

Good ideas, the ones people are willing to pay for, are an
evolution from simpler forms.This
doesn’t mean that once you get an idea, wait six months for those red pumps you
saw in the closet to turn into the Ruby Slippers.Inspiration happens all the time, usually
when you are not thinking about the idea.However, it is a balancing act.If you don’t think about it at all, your subconscious discards the image
as unimportant, but hammering the idea into form will bring on frustration and
leave you with something that has been beaten to death.

Good ideas are not “gotten” they are developed.

Have you ever taken an art class?Students start with basic shapes.Circles, squares, cylinders, cones.Later, come shading and perspective.It’s all good at this point to keep exploring
the early stage of development.Keep
drawing those shapes and seeing them in all the objects around you until the
concepts become natural.This
beginner-level, basic stage is important.It is where you are going to want to give up.With patience you see, not the idea, but your
own thinking process quantum jump to the next stage and move closer into
something that looks professional.It
feels almost like your IQ raises a few points.This reminds me of my Typing I class in high school, back in the
Precambrian era where we learned to type on these humming things that had no
monitor and went clackety-clack!We were proud of ourselves because we finally
knew the location of every key on the keyboard.The instructor reminded us, however, that knowing the keyboard did not
make us typists.“Right now,” he said, “you
still have to make a conscious effort to press each key.In time, the movement will become automatic
and you will be typing words instead of individual letters.”

Back to the art class analogy.You’ve got the basic shapes down.Circles easily become spheres on paper.Trees and the human form are full of
cylinders and cones.Then, someone tells
you that light coming into a room behaves a little like water.Really?That is a more sophisticated concept than “the farthest surface from the
light is the darkest.”You can now use
that information.Before it might have
been interesting but was not yet useful as a tool.Your understanding broadens and it too becomes
more sophisticated.

Studying color, you learn that the darkest objects are the
closest to your eye and the farthest are pale because you are looking at them
through more air.It makes sense.Your understanding is evolving again.Even the way you touch the paper changes,
because now the portrait is so close to finished that the lightest whisper-touch
of the pencil makes the difference in the image looking off or looking real.

Ideas develop in the same way, as a series of passes.Some passes rake away debris.Others bring out new aspects.Layer after layer, the image sharpens and
becomes unique and interesting, until someone says, “How did you do that?Where do you get all your ideas?”

The reason this question annoys so many successful writers
is because it is so difficult to answer.It would take too long for them to explain about all the in-between
steps.Most writers probably don’t
remember them anyway.They simply made
the strokes over and over again, slowly moving the lines until they looked
right, darkening the contrast until it had depth.At some point they realize, “Wow, that’s
good.It looks real.”

Related post:

Scott Morgan’s WriteHook climbed high into my list of most
frequent Internet landing pads from the first time the link beguiled me and I
did click.The header dropped that first
bit of advice coming from the core of his design in a font so blood red that I
have been tempted to touch the screen to see if it is wet:Write for the jugular.

What does that mean?It means Scott is a writer, soul to chromosome, and to paraphrase Robert
Heinlein, he pays attention to writing in the same way that most people pay
attention to their own heartbeats.His
honesty never bores or depresses you with laments of how no one reads anymore
or how trying to make a living writing is like making a living trying to win
the lottery.He doesn’t ask you, “Do you
want to write, or do you want to have written?”

He probably doesn’t care.

But I don’t need to sell the point when his material speaks
for itself.Here are a couple of quotes
from his site to give you a feel of his perspective:

“I am a former journalist. Former. I
love that word so much because journalism will salt you up and eat your soul
with a side of home fries and then wipe its greasy fingers all over what's left
of your face.”

Scott has done (and succeeded at) this writing thing for more
than half of his life.He likes showing
you how to take a wishy-washy character and drop an engine into it.Treat yourself to an epiphany and watch his
video to see what happens to your characters when you learn what D.R.I.V.E. is.I watched it, felt my jaw drop, and then
immediately went to Amazon and bought his book Character Development from the Inside Out.